No disrespect intended, but this is what happens when someone barges in to a topic that is very very old and has been discussed to death.

rdelorme wrote:I agree that there is no yard capacity to do major refits, thus any refits need to be "simple". The point of any "refit" would be to provide ships for picket duty; system defense and convoy escorts; duties where the ships would have "back up" in the form of system defense pods or where speed and missile ranges are less critical. The object is to build ships for temporary duty; stop gap measures until Manticore can recover its shipbuilding capacity. I suspect the most valuable ships would be the light units as there they could take over convoy escort and duties in Silisia and thus free up more capable ships

Noone in RMN service (or GA service, for that matter) is trained on SLN hardware. There is no infrastructure to provide their consumables (spare parts, missiles), and you are forgetting that SLN ships uniformly require larger crews for a given role than Manticoran vessels do. Given the manning constraints the RMN is under, providing crews for old, obsolete vessels of a different star nation is not on the cards.

The SD are big, have lots of life support, lots of power. I can think of two uses for these monsters that would require no major yard work. 1) they can be the core of a Greyson style disperse yard. They have loots of cubage to put workshops in (like missile storage facilities and marine barracks. They have some internal repair capacity already. Thus the ships would basically become the core for shipyard providing power, workers quarters and some space for fabrication shops. In this role any modification would be internal and not ripping through the armor. For those that argue that it would be more efficient to build new space station: my answer is who is going the build them? Beowulf is building space stations to operate system defense pods. Thus I would place these a few such SD-stations in the Talbot systems and use them to rebuild a the "light" SLN units.

This fails the "freighter" test. As in, would it be possible to use one of the freighters that have been withdrawn from SL service for a similar purpose by refitting it with modular components in cargo bays?

Superdreadnoughts do not have "lots of cubage". They are as solidly built as possible, and the various magazines are not easily converted to anything. Any modification to these vessels will involve some form of ripping through armor; that's not optional given the way SDs are built.

2)The requirements for the proposed system defense stations is that they operate a SD powered drone for the FTL com and have fire control systems for the system defense pods. The SLN DN already have the capacity to power a large drone and they have lost of space to add fire control systems. Thus any refits would be mostly internal: new telemetry links could be routed through existing missile tubes or the new systems could be build in an existing boat bay; thus avoiding the need to cut through the armor. Personally I favor the boat bay concept as the whole unit could be manufactured on an assembly line and fitted into the bay. Such a refit would negate any need for yard work. Yes the SD would be vulnerable, but a space station is a sitting duck to C-fraction missiles, where as the SD could move out of the way. Besides the only purpose of the unit is to control the system defense pods.

Again, wrong: "Purely internal" refits are larger than you think.

LIGHT UNITS:So let us look at what are usable assets in a CA or BC and what is not usable. Through out the books League hardware is praised for being very advanced and high tech. Thus the core computers are most likely very good; but SLN software was poor. Thus the computer need to be reprogramed: this refit does not need a shipyard. The EW is very poor, and would need to be replaced; EW units are by their very nature near the surface of the ship and they have to have access through the armor to broadcast. Thus updating these system would not require major yard work.

The ships lack FTL and a full up system would require extensive rebuild. But the Alliance has FTL com in missiles, thus it should be possible to make small units that can be mounted externally or in drones keep near the mother ships. Drones may in fact be the best option for adding limited FTL capacity, but this area will significantly limit the ships to rear line duties.

Again: The main reason why these ships are useless is because noone has the manpower to use these things. They may be fine ships, perfectly good as escorts for convoys (except, they aren't), but the manpower to operate them simply does not exist.

It is not really practical to increase the speed and sidewalls, but a bow and stern wall could be added externally, as this was the original approach that Manticore took.

Point defense systems are laughable, but these systems are by their very nature outside the main armor belt, thus they could be replaced using limited yards.

They can't be enhanced to a degree that would make a difference.

There is no point in replacing the internal missile launchers, but one could a some pods to the exterior of the ships. The ships control links would have to be upgraded.

Thus it is possible to refit these so that out class and SLN or pirate ship and do so limited yard work. I suspect that one could use a disperse yard concept build around the old SD and the work could be done in Talbot, using imported components. The work does not have to be efficient as long as the units are put into service in a few months.

So it has to be efficient. And be done by workforces that aren't trained to work on large capital ships (or even, for that matter, small ones). And then you have to find crews. And train them. And then find supplies for these ships. And, once you've done all that, you have to find missions for these ships. Preferably ones that do not involve them getting close to anything that might wish them ill, since it is borderline criminal to send out crews in ships you know are substandard.

SLN DestroyerThe only use I can think of for the capture destroyers is as scout and survey ships. The "Empire" need to explore and survey its new acquisitions. The work is generally non-combat and tedious work that can take years. But that attack on Maniticore space-stations has clearly shown the need to find possible places to build it own "secret" shipyard. And survey work is an ideal job for small old ships that have no place in the line of battle.

Use a freighter. Put a sensor suite on it and fill a hold with drones.

I love the negativity from "experts": For your information I am very well versed in what it takes to refit a warship (In the 1980 gained a wee bit of experience fitting modern systems into 1940's era ships). It is not as difficult as you make it out to be.

As for using DD as survey ships: they do not need to be refitted the SLN tech is more than capable of handling this job and the crews missions could be drawn from crews from the Talbott sector or Silesia.

What you failed to grasp the central point of my post: ONE does not need to do major overhauls to use the ships in limited roles. As for replacement missiles on light units, one would not replace the internal missile, there are plenty of captured spares and the ships will most likely only use pods missile when dealing with pirates. I would like to point out the average pirate is using tech that is far below the SLN; thus captured light units would be used in Silesia or patrol remote regions away from the "war zone".

The argument for crew is legitimate; but Manticore has a large population in the Talbott sector (many times the Manticore home systems pop) that is not up to the educational level required to serve of Manticore ships. The SLN ships can be crewed by this population: thus the ships do not draw on "Manticores" crewmen. In the long run the ships could become a training bridge into the senior service.

rdelorme wrote:I love the negativity from "experts": For your information I am very well versed in what it takes to refit a warship (In the 1980 gained a wee bit of experience fitting modern systems into 1940's era ships). It is not as difficult as you make it out to be.

I am willing to wager literally every thing I own that your experience in refitting 20th century Post-Diaspora warships is no more extensive than any of ours. Just how much BattleSteel did you need to cut through on those ships?

rdelorme wrote:The argument for crew is legitimate; but Manticore has a large population in the Talbott sector (many times the Manticore home systems pop) that is not up to the educational level required to serve of Manticore ships. The SLN ships can be crewed by this population: thus the ships do not draw on "Manticores" crewmen. In the long run the ships could become a training bridge into the senior service.

Manticore has no plan to create a two-tier service, though, and every intention of avoiding such an inequitable structure. They want a single Navy that is integrated throughout, without any of the problems like Haven had with a separate StateSec navy.

If you don't mind a spoiler from the latest book, check out what's been posted on the matter in the Honorverse forum: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8989

rdelorme wrote:What you failed to grasp the central point of my post: ONE does not need to do major overhauls to use the ships in limited roles. As for replacement missiles on light units, one would not replace the internal missile, there are plenty of captured spares and the ships will most likely only use pods missile when dealing with pirates. I would like to point out the average pirate is using tech that is far below the SLN; thus captured light units would be used in Silesia or patrol remote regions away from the "war zone".

Unfortunately for you, we have a canon answer for the question of what Manticore decided to do with the captured ships, and it is uniformly "Scrap for parts".

The argument for crew is legitimate; but Manticore has a large population in the Talbott sector (many times the Manticore home systems pop) that is not up to the educational level required to serve of Manticore ships. The SLN ships can be crewed by this population: thus the ships do not draw on "Manticores" crewmen. In the long run the ships could become a training bridge into the senior service.

The Talbott Cluster systems, with the exception of Rembrandt, do not have a corps of trained spacers that could be retrained to man these ships. By the time these crews are trained to be proficient in handling actual warships (as opposed to the LACs they were handling before), said actual warships built to RMN standards will be available.

Also, you're making a very definitive error in assuming that just because the SLN ships are old they do not require core world levels of education to run.